What’s up with the Little Icons on My Photos?

March 28, 2014

If you’ve been cruising around ACDSee/ACDSee Pro, you’ve definitely come in contact with the File List pane. You know, that place in the middle of Manage mode with all of the thumbnails of the images in the folder you’re currently viewing?

From time to time, you’re going to come across what we call “overlay icons” on these thumbnails. These icons let you know relevant info about your photos at a glance.

Navigating the Complex World of Overlay Icons:
Ok, it’s not actually complicated at all. I just wanted to make it sound cool. Some icons are just to let you know stuff, whereas others are interactive. So, let’s break it down:

If your file displays a little red speaker, the file has embedded or associated audio.

If the red speaker looks like this, then that means you clicked the regular speaker icon and now the sound is playing at this very moment! (Just relax; it’s only sound. You’re not a chinchilla.)

A number on your thumbnail is the rating. You must have rated it at some point. If you want to rate your photo, do this:

A colored bar across the bottom of the thumbnail is a color label. If you want to assign your photo a color label, do this:

If you see an adorable blue hamburger icon on your thumbnail, that’s the Embed Pending icon. It appears if your file has ACDSee metadata stored in the ACDSee database, but it hasn’t been written to the file yet. Metadata like what? Like you added a color label or rating, etc. To get rid of that icon, you can either embed the metadata, (write the metadata to the file), or clear the icon. For the former, right-click the thumbnail and select Embed ACDsee Metadata. For the latter, right-click the thumbnail and select Clear Embed Pending Flag. This gets rid of the icon, but doesn’t write the metadata to the file.

The file format icon lets you know what kind of file you’re dealing with. It doesn’t do much else, but if you left-click it, you’ll get a display of the file information, image attributes, and EXIF metadata summary on the File tab of the Properties pane. You can also get to this by left-clicking on the Embed Pending icon.

The icon that looks like a green label you’d find on a Christmas present is to represent a file that has been categorized. You can left-click this icon to open the Categories section of the Organize tab on the Properties pane to identify/edit/whatever the category.

This eye getting rudely covered up by a postage stamp is the icon that tells you that that file is stored in an offline device:

The Don’t Play icon, (for all you Uno fans), represents files excluded from the ACDSee database.

The orange square with a checkmark represents a file that has been tagged.To tag a thumbnail, click the checkmark with the grey box.

The turquoise Ouija board planchette means that your file has been geotagged. To investigate, left-click it to open the Map pane.

This purple rotate symbol appears if the file has been automatically rotated. Left-click this symbol to rotate the image permanently and update the EXIF information.

The half-moon represents a developed file, (as in, you made changes in Develop mode).

And the blue crayon tells you that you have edited the file, (in Edit mode).

Overlay Icon Visibility

If you’ve got some kind of beef with the overlay icons, — maybe overlay icons insulted your mother, — you don’t have to look at them. You can decide if you want them visible, visible in color, or if you just want specific ones in color.

At the top of the File List pane, click View | Toggle Overlay Mode to control the visibility and color. Toggle through the available modes with this ] key.

Alternatively, click View | Highlight Overlay to select which icons appear in color. Toggle through the modes with this [ key.

For more control over overlay icons, such as whether individual icons are displayed, go to Tools | Options. In the Options window, under File List, choose Thumbnail Info.